Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace Alexander B
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This article was downloaded by: [George Washington University] On: 29 July 2012, At: 13:15 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Security Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20 Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace Alexander B. Downes a & Mary Lauren Lilley a a Duke University Version of record first published: 28 May 2010 To cite this article: Alexander B. Downes & Mary Lauren Lilley (2010): Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace, Security Studies, 19:2, 266-306 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636411003795756 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Security Studies, 19:266–306, 2010 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 online DOI: 10.1080/09636411003795756 Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace ALEXANDER B. DOWNES AND MARY LAUREN LILLEY Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter- democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses re- garding covert foreign regime change from three theories of demo- cratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government docu- ments, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970–73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks- and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that demo- cratic executives supposedly avoid. Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 13:15 29 July 2012 INTRODUCTION Democracies, as is now widely known, rarely if ever go to war with one another. Yet there are a number of instances in which democracies have Alexander B. Downes is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Mary Lauren Lilley received her A.B. in Political Science from Duke in 2006. The authors would like to thank the following for helpful comments on previous drafts of this article: Gil Friedman, Robert McMahon, participants in Christopher Gelpi’s graduate in- ternational relations workshop at Duke University in Fall 2007, and two anonymous reviewers from Security Studies. 266 Overt Peace, Covert War? 267 covertly used forceful means short of war to remove elected governments from power, a phenomenon we label covert foreign regime change.The United States and Great Britain, for example, engineered the downfall of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. The United States then helped topple Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz the following year and assisted rebels in Indonesia hoping to overthrow Sukarno in 1957–58. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to remove Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo, in 1960, and the United States also played an important role in the removal of Cheddi Jagan in British Guyana and Joao˜ Goulart in Brazil in the 1960s. Most famously, perhaps, the Richard Nixon administration attempted to prevent the Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from taking office in 1970 and later encouraged the Chilean military to depose him.1 What are the implications of this practice for theories of democratic peace (DP)? A number of scholars have suggested that inter-democratic covert interventions constitute a possible anomaly for DP. Although these commen- tators do not always specify which theory of DP they believe is contradicted by inter-democratic covert intervention, those who do generally point to norms arguments. Realist critics, such as Sebastian Rosato, argue that instances of covert regime change among democracies suggest that “democracies do not always treat each other with trust and respect when they have a conflict of interest,” thereby undermining a key plank of norms explanations for DP.2 With regard to the United States, Stephen Van Evera points out that in nine of the eleven cases “in which elected nationalist or leftist regimes in the Third World have adopted policies that disturbed Washington . the United States attempted to overthrow the elected government.” Van Evera concludes that “American leaders have favored democracy only when it has produced governments that support American policy. Otherwise they have sought to subvert democracy.”3 Similarly, Patrick James and Glenn Mitchell identify what they call the “potential victims of the democratic peace”: weak, isolated democracies, which—by trying to escape a situation of structural 1 On these cases generally, see John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Downloaded by [George Washington University] at 13:15 29 July 2012 Change in the Cold War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008); Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006); David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (November 2003): 590–91; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and David P. Forsythe, “Democracy, War, and Covert Action,” Journal of Peace Research 29, no. 4 (November 1992): 385–95. Although Eisenhower ordered Lumumba’s removal, and the CIA did plot to assassinate him, Belgium and the UN played a larger role in overthrowing him. Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba,trans. Ann Wright and Renee´ Fenby (London: Verso, 2001). 2 Rosato, “Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” 590. 3 Stephen Van Evera, “The Case against Intervention,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1990, 76. 268 A. B. Downes and M. L. Lilley dependence on a powerful democracy—threaten the economic interests of that state.4 According to James and Mitchell, “Covert attacks provide a serious challenge to the cultural premise of democratic peace”; such interventions, Rosato writes, suggest that “democratic trust and respect has often been subordinated to security and economic interests.”5 Realists are not the only scholars to acknowledge that covert inter- vention among democracies occurs and constitutes an anomaly for DP.In an otherwise cautiously optimistic assessment of the peace-inducing effects of the spread of democracy, for example, Georg Sørenson notes that the quality of relations among the advanced democracies in the Northern Hemi- sphere has not been replicated in their relations with the newer democracies in the South. After reviewing several cases of inter-democratic intervention, Sørenson writes that “these and other examples are hardly evidence of Kant’s expectation about democracies developing peaceful relations based on a common understanding and a shared moral foundation.” Echoing the realist sentiments above, Sørenson argues that “the USA turns against some democ- racies because it fears that they will hurt US economic interests, or they will develop into communist regimes which threaten US security, or they will do both.”6 Democratic peace theorists themselves recognize that cases of covert intervention among democracies represent a challenge to at least some DP theories. Proponents of theories grounded in democratic institutions, for ex- ample, point to such interventions as providing ammunition against norms arguments. According to Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, “The normative theory in straightforward terms forecasts that democracies would not use any means, overt or covert, to subvert or overthrow another democratically elected gov- ernment, as such action would clearly be a violation of democratic norms.”7 Finally, otherwise staunch defenders of DP concede that “instances of Amer- ican military interventions against other, weaker democratic regimes”